The process of taking a paper-intensive business such as ACUITY, a regional property/casualty carrier in Sheboygan, Wis., into a paperless environment is not unlike someone trying to break the smoking habit. It aint easy. The tie to paper is very hard to break, says Gary Henderson, a director of information systems at ACUITY.

The battle began five years ago and is now near completion. But unlike some long-term projects, the return on this investment came rather quickly. ACUITY is saving $6 million annually in paper overhead and facilities thanks to the implementation of Content Manager by IBM, according to Neal Ruffalo, ACUITYs vice president, enterprise technology. We were able to close all of our satellite offices and empower our field personnel with the tools to work out of their homes, he says. We have between 150 and 200 remote users now.

ACUITY has been an IBM shop for years, even prior to 2001 when the company changed its name from Heritage Mutual Insurance. The relationship didnt keep the insurer from examining other document management solutions, according to Henderson. He reports four software companies were contacted before the decision was made to purchase what was initially known as IBM Visualinfo but has since changed to Content Manager.

The decision was based on two aspects of the Content Manager systemOn Demand for cold storage and its Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). IBM was one of the few companies that offered a product such as EIP. It gave us federated search capabilities from one hit list across multiple repositories as well as access to those repositories via the Web, which is important for our remote employees, says Jim Glavan, also an ACUITY IS director.

The savings in time because of better workflow is harder to ascertain, but ACUITY knows it is on the right track. We have gained substantial turnaround in time on personal lines policies, says Glavan. We can turn personal lines policies around within 24 hours. Recently we installed the same process for commercial lines, and weve been seeing pretty close to a 50 percent reduction in processing times for commercial policies. Ruffalo adds, Automated workflow is a huge component of all this.

No installation is perfect, and there were some functionality issues that ACUITY needed to work out. At times you are looking for a document and it comes in upside down, so you need to be able to turn it over, says Henderson. This and other challenges were worked out, including a bar-code problem that was solved during beta testing. One of the problems we had was there were a lot of documents that had [different] bar codes, and depending on how the system reacted to [the other bar codes], sometimes it would make [those documents into] new documents that needed to be indexed, says Tina Pokrzywinski, still another IS director for ACUITY. We had to find a way to come up with a unique bar code or patch code. We knew what we wanted, and we knew what IBM said it was going to deliver. The two didnt necessarily meet in the middle, and it took a little time to get to that point.

The personal lines segment of the company has gone totally paperless now, according to Glavan. As for commercial lines, all new business and renewals are paperless. Pokrzywinski says internal claims work is paperless except for recorded statements, which are on cassette tapes. She says the company plans to record voice statements digitally and put them directly into the Content Manager. Digital photos taken by field reps are already stored on the system.

Glavan points out the On Demand function allows ACUITY to keep policies in PDF files that can be accessed by employees and agents over the Web. Most of the agencies that use it love it, he says. When you have a radical change like this, some agencies are going to be afraid to use it, but down the road, more and more will feel comfortable with it. Robert Regis Hyle

Case File
The Problem: Too much paper and too little productivity.
The Company: ACUITY
Web site:www.acuity.com
net written premium: $418.2 million
The software: Content Manager by IBM
Web site:www.ibm.com

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